She grew up on the Gulf Coast, suspended between Galveston and New Orleans. Her early musical heros were practically neighbors. Ray Charles. Jerry Lee Lewis. Little Richard. Soul bands passed through her home town. Delta blues was everywhere.

But it started before that.

“I came out of a household where there were piano players,” she said. “Especially my grandmother, who played Tin Pan Alley, all that bouncy, stride sort of piano.

“Where I come from, in Louisiana, there is a lot of music.

“If you are a piano player, it was a great place to come from.”

We get to benefit from that.

Ball, probably the best barrelhouse piano player in the game right now, will appear at The Narrows Center for the Arts, 16 Anawan St., on Friday, July 10.

When she walks on stage, tall and thin with enviable posture, she looks like everyone’s favorite fourth grade teacher. Then she starts to play and you feel like you have moved from school to the red light district.

“What I play is what I call New Orleans rhythm and blues,” Ball said. “It is a Gulf Coast based music, the music I grew up hearing.”

Ball is touring to support her latest album, “The Tattooed Lady And The Alligator Man.” It is a rocking album, driven by Ball’s piano. You can hear the influence of Professor Longhair and other New Orleans piano players who started out playing in brothels. Plus, it makes you want to dance.

“I grew up on the state line, between Texas and Louisiana,” Ball said. “I inherited a little of both cultures.”

But in both Texas and in Louisiana, music is meant to be danced to, Ball said.

“Not all music cultures are as devoted to dancing as the Gulf Coast is,” she said. “You can hear it in the music.”

She has been at it for a while. Armed with a degree in English, she began work as a full time musician in 1970, playing in a progressive country band in Austin, Texas. She has 17 albums and shelves of awards, including a Grammy nomination and several awards from Blues Music.

She got to make a record with her idol, Irma Thomas. Dr. John produced the album she recorded with her friends, Angela Strehli and Lou Ann Barton.

Ball lives in Austin now and gets to New Orleans whenever she can. Those are places where you can hear great music just by going for a walk in the afternoon.

Hearing good music and working with her musical heroes changes the way she plays, but not much, Ball said. The rhythms she learned from her grandmother and from her neighbors as a child stay with her.

“It is really visceral to me,” she said. “I can listen to a lot of music. When it hits me, it is almost physical.

“I like grooves so much. I’m always listening for a different groove. I try to put it in context.”

That context is the New Orleans and Texas dance music she heard from the day she was born.

“That region is the cradle of much of America’s music,” she said. “I was lucky to be born there.”